Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: The Presidents Are Sick

Episode Date: June 16, 2016

The presidents have, by and large, all been sick, sick men. We're going to talk about exactly how sick as Dr. Sydnee and Justin explore presidential disease. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

And lovely the host says, she'll be taken as medical advice. He's been painting his hand and fun for an hour and not trying to diagnose your mystery coil. We think you've heard it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird room. You're worth it. that we are your own, your own worthy. This is very far from me.

Hello everybody. My name is Justin far from me. Hello, everybody. My name is Justin McRoy and this is my wife, Sydney McRoy. This is our podcast solbons. This is a whole new intro that we're doing. I have never remembered an intro when I went out on stage as long as I've lived and dear, I don't plan to start now. Well, we're recording this. So could you do like the normal form of man you're supposed to? Literally, I don't, can you?

You're supposed to. You're supposed to. Can you? What's the, what's the first, like, give me a few? Hello and welcome to Saw Bones, the Mayor of Torrent, Miss Guy and Medicine. I am a co-host just to Macroi.

And what's the name, Macroi? Yeah. Yeah. We nailed it. Do I have to do everything. We nailed it. Do I have to do everything? We nailed it. This is so. Did Travis lean this far?

I don't know. I feel very short. I'm feeling very like not lengthy enough. Thank you for having us here in your beautiful city of Washington, T.C. We went to your mall today. One. It's not the kind of mall just in the last. Very bad mall, not a good mall. It's about a good mall as Piccadilly Circus is a circus.

But we went to the mall where all of our nation's presidents are buried here in this city where by law all of our nation's presidents have been born Here and it it's really inspirational Well, well Well sort of we actually we went to your mall with with a toddler So what we did is we went to the natural history museum for an hour. We went to the butterfly room. And then we ate in the cafeteria and left. So it was a very fulfilling four hours. We sat on your mall and had a beer and tried to recover from the experience. And she only tried to get like four butterflies.

That was great. But no, it's great. This feels so historic being here. Well, it does. And so I thought in light of that and the spirit of that, we'd have kind of a historical topic. Like what's it? You know, it's a history show. Yeah, I want to.

How about a presidential topic? Anybody an lesson to saw buns before? Raise your hand, don't be afraid. OK, it's a medical history show That's the whole pitch I'm not a picture more than already here. You already got their money too late. I don't care Like it or don't do I get a beer? Not now. I don't care. No, wait no, I do wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait done, come on. You just want to show about manners. Yeah, come on. So I thought we would talk about a lot of our presidents

weren't healthy. And so I thought we could talk about some of the presidential diseases, some different presidents, and some of their medical issues. Okay. And especially some of the really dumb ways we tried to address them. I think I speak for the entire audience

when I say, wouldn't teeth case closed? What do you mean that's the one I know? Well, and we'll start with George Washington. I think that's appropriate. Nice. Because he was our first president. And he was also pretty sickly. He had a lot of stuff.

He was probably all the time that he was doing all the, you know, it's great. He's cool dude, obviously. But the war and stuff were like, hmm. But he's pretty sick. Potomac huge fan crossed it like, what? Oh my God, that was him, right? I think that's it. It's not a history, history podcast, all right?

So he had to start with, he had dip theory as a child, which is not like rare for that time period, he wasn't unique, because you know, this is, you know, I have to bring this up, because this is before vaccines, which is why you don't get dip theory, and now thank you vaccines, please. Go get vaccinated. So, there's my brief plug for vaccines. He got TB, he also had tuberculosis TB, and he got it while he was taking his brother to Barbados because his brother had TB.

And it was thought that the air there was cleaner. So he took his brother thing, oh, I got TB. I'm going to take it to Barbados. And then you're going to recover. And then he got TB too. So that was a bummer. TB too, the sequel, the way worse version of TB. He also got smallpox there, but he did recover, of course, obviously.

But he always had, I guess he always had the complexion to prove it after that. Oh, really? So we just came here to talk about the president's complexions. And he also had dysentery a lot. He had one bout of dysentery during the French and Indian War that was reportedly so bad, his butt hurt so bad from this dysentery that he had to put a pillow on the horse that he was riding, which put him in danger, because he was elevated above everybody else,

like a perfect target. But he was butt hurt, so he was riding, which put him in danger, because he was like elevated above everybody else, like a perfect target. But he was like, I guess butter, so he's like, forget it, I don't care. I gotta have this pillow. You know the word that's really bothering me in this reportedly? Because how's your report going? Well, it's pretty good.

The first part is about how my boss has such bad boobs. There's a sit on a danger pillow and a touch bullet. So I guess I'm pretty much done with my report, I says the file. Partly. Or he's like, someone get me a pin. His tree needs to know. I got to write this down.

How my week is gone. Nobody's going to believe this. Other random illnesses, of course, he got malaria. He got tonsillitis. He got pneumonia. He had a big carbuncle, like a big abscess infection on his face at one point. The people thought was a tumor.

It wasn't thank goodness. It was just a big infection. But what got him finally was first, he got epiglottitis, which was swelling of the epiglottis. He got an infection and it got so big that he couldn't swallow, which was bad enough, except what really probably killed Washington were his doctors.

Because the treatment at the time for well anything was to bleed him. So they did. They bled about 80 ounces out of him. That's so many. That's a lot. For reference, the human body has about 170. Oh man.

So I'd mirror like half. So unfortunately, the president passed away soon after. Because of the blood. But luckily, you can still get donations of his blood today. There was just so much. Now, another president, some of these presidents I was reading about, I know very little about. The thing I knew about Grover Cleveland is that he was president twice and not consecutively. Right.

And there you go. He also, here's the other thing I now know about him and you will too. He also had a tumor in the roof of his mouth early in his second term, but he didn't want anybody to know. His doctor told him, that's cancer, we got to do something. He didn't want any of his constituents to know because he wanted to look strong, which I think that's still a thing, our president's trying to look tough. He arranged for a fishing trip on a frenziat. He announced, I will be gone for four days on a fishing.

Which will be crazy now. You won't hear from gone for four days on a fishing, which will be crazy now? You won't hear from me for four days, no communication, the country's running on its own. Yeah, best of luck, everybody. I don't know, Biden's in charge. We're out. Out. Four days. Did he make it?

We put him on the compost. Now, the, uh. I have a hug if you're here. Um. But anyway, so he took off for four days on a yacht. He had six surgeons waiting for him to remove. Oh, yeah. That's a chill assignment, though.

Like, if you have to get an assignment to go remove a place in this mouth, boomer, like, you could do worse than chillin' on a yacht for four days. And they did. They did surgery, they removed the tumor, they removed five teeth and a big part of his jaw. They did it all through his mouth and he was very insistent on this because he had a mustache that he was very well known for. And he didn't want him to upset the stash, so he had to go through the mouth.

And he came back and no one ever knew. Nice, well we knew. Well now we and he came back and no one ever knew. Nice. Well, we knew. Well, now we know. I mean, we'll meet you later. Do you think they rushed through it on the first day? It's like, ah, they're doing the pig roast tonight, and I would really like to get out to there, and I'd love them my time.

You know what guys were wearing them here for four days? Let's make this out today. Let's get this to our out. Just enjoy ourselves. You know, they have one for us. A president that I think a lot of people are aware of got sick was William Henry Harrison. Do you remember William Henry Harrison?

He had a bad, not a very impactful president. No, fairly short. Oh, Bill Harrison. So let me give you a little history, because it's kind of interesting the story about, I don't know, I mean most of us know that he was president for like 30 days. And that's it.

But he was born in Virginia. He served in the army. To have Virginia. He was the hero of the Battle of Tippie, Canoe. Antile too. Antile too, because that was his campaign slogan, right? Tippie, Canoe, and Tyler too, so he was known as like a war hero.

He also recaptured Detroit from the British in 1812. That him, we wouldn't have Detroit. So there you go. He ran on a log cabin campaign, which I read about that, and I was like, what does that mean? So it's because his opponents tried to make him look like this old geyser guy, like he sits on the porch of his log cabin and he drinks his cider and we need to put him out to pasture like

that was how they tried to make him look because that's what it meant. Back in the day to be old you would sit on the porch your log cabin and drink cider. Yeah, so the old people used to do it. It would bring out logs from a log cabin he would karate chop them in half. I mean like now it's all mad. His supporters actually would give out that they kind of like went with it. They're like, fine, you want to go with log cabin, we're going to roll with it. And they made these bottles of whiskey, shaped like log cabins. And they

would give them out to people like vote, hey vote for Harrison, vote for old Tippy canoe, log cabin, we got it. They were actually made by the EC Boos Company, which is where Boos comes from. That's B-O-O-Z, like Fluos, but Boos. Right, yeah. No, E, we add an E now on these days, I guess. Thanks, Justin. No problem. No problem.

So, I didn't want anybody to tweak that hot facts and like put an E on there, or any erroneously. So as we know, he was our ninth president. It was the shortest term. He was a very hearty outdoorsman. He was a farmer. He thought, I can handle foul weather.

So when he gave his inaugural speech, we've probably heard this story. It went on for two hours. It was the longest in history at 8,445 words. And supposedly, as the story goes, he caught a cold while he was out giving this very long speech and he'd think he got pneumonia and he died a month later. And then Tyler became president.

But let's pause for a second, because there's a really gross story about this beautiful city that I wanna share now. Until 1850, there was no sewage system here. It's a really gross story about this beautiful city that I want to share now. Until 1850, there was no sewage system here. So yay for sewage. We used to know how to party. What?

Sewage is great. So waste would just kind of flow across the ground and just like end up wherever. And there was this marsh that formed about seven blocks from the White House, a marsh of human waste. And it was actually like orchestrated like this is where we shall dump our waste. And like you could take it out, you're there yourself, like you could haul it there on your own, or they would even, you could pay somebody the like, call your waist to the White House Marsh. This was a really dirty place.

So it was like this big swampy marsh, and there were all kinds of bacteria there, there were mosquitoes, swarming all over it, and there were probably a lot of diseases in there, including typhoid. Now we have looked back at President Harrison and now we think he probably actually died of typhoid. It probably had nothing to do with his speech. It was probably the White House itself that did him in. Whoa! So... So there you go. I've always given that guy such a hard time. Yeah. Hey, I'm sorry.

Or I'm sorry. I don't know where he's chilling up or down. I had listened, I don't know what he died from. I don't know if he was like a nice dude or not. Like I said, you're in judge of fool. I thought he died of a call for 35 years. Now, we thought this more because as we've studied other presidents, we think that other similar things

may have been the results of the White House Marsh, as I'm always going to think of it now. Zachary Taylor, our 12th president, who was only president for about 16 months. Do you think there's such a pole there now? That'd be amazing. I hope not because we'll probably accidentally eat there. Yeah. So President Taylor, in 1850 on the 4th of July, as part of the 4th of July celebrations,

he was going around attending fundraisers, and he was out, it was a very hot day. He was outside most of the day. And he ate a lot of things. He ate a lot of raw vegetables, which would have been washed in some sort of water. He ate, this is one of the things I kept finding over there. We're going to have a big bowl of cherries.

So we have very large bowl of cherries. And he had many glasses of iced milk. I guess that was really popular? What iced milk? What's wrong with that? It's called milk. What's all these people? Ice and your milk.

So later that evening, he started getting profused diarrhea and vomiting. He developed a fever. He became very ill. There were four physicians who took care of him. They tended to him day and night. They gave him the treatments of the time, which were mainly like opium and quinine, lots of mercury, all the good stuff. But nothing helped, and unfortunately he died five days later. Now, what's strange is that we were never really sure what got him.

It was recorded at the time that it was cholera, but a lot of diarrhea was blamed on cholera then. So later on people started thinking it probably wasn't cholera. So there was thought like, well maybe it was typhoid. Since now we know there was this White House swamp and there was probably typhoid everywhere. Maybe you got typhoid. Except one historian in the 1990s, Clara Rising thought, you know what? Maybe he was poisoned. Now why did she think this? Because Taylor adamantly opposed slavery. Despite the fact, as I found out, he was a slave owner, he did oppose slavery, and he was fighting to ensure

that all the new states that were being added out west would not allow slavery in those states. And so there were a lot of people in the South who wanted him dead. And the president that followed him after he died, Millard Fillmore, was fine with allowing slavery everywhere. So there was this thought, like, ooh, maybe he was assassinated by someone from the South. So Ryzen was so convinced of this that she decided she wanted

to prove it by exhuming his body. Because she tried to get a hair sample first, but there was no hair sample. She wanted to prove that there was poison there. And she couldn't find any. So she wanted to exume his body, and the only way she could do that was if she found a family member

and got their permission. So she starts calling everybody with the last name Taylor. LAUGHTER This is what she did. Eventually, she found a guy who was a descendant of the president. His name was John Mechel-Henny.

He was 84 years old and he was the great, great, great grandson of Taylor. He's also, by the way, related to the guy who invented Tabasco sauce. All right, so I know. So all this huge case, like she tracks on this guy, he gives permission, then she has to get permission from the Jefferson County Kentucky corner and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and she goes through all these hoops and they exhumed the body, and they study the hair looking for arsenic, and there's not any because he died of typhoid. That's a crazy story. Wow, man. That's not how I thought was going to end. But to be fair, I probably would have heard about it

before now. I'm just adding it to that. You think that'd be the first thing you'd find. Like when you Google, I'm like poisoned. There is an afterlife, and Taylor is watching from heaven. I hate that he had to go through that, huh? What are they? I doubt it.

Oh no, come on! Ah! It was just time! Come on! It was the cherries! Poor guy. The medicines, the medicines that I skilled in my cards for the mouth. The last president I want to talk to you about was James Garfield. He was our 20th president in 1881.

Like that was the only year he was president. You'll find out why. And I know what you're thinking. Now, was it he shot? We know what killed him. That's not a disease. We know that one. Let poison it. It doesn't count. But there's more to it. Okay. And let me say this. I found out a lot about James Garfield. He was

kind of a cool dude. He was really smart. He was like a self-made man. He could write in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, like at the same time. I don't know what utility you have. In that, it was, I have to get two pressing messages out right now. You know what he's gonna do when he's drunk at a party every time, like, watch this. Cool, right ladies? Cool, right?

I wrote fart in both of them. So he became president. And like I said, he's really smart, smart dude. He may have done a lot of great things. Unfortunately, we won't know, because this was the era of the spoils system, which meant that anybody who wanted a position in government, all you had to do was just go ask for it.

Like, you could get an interview with the president and demand no matter what your qualifications or experience or anything. So he would spend lots of time, all the presidents had interviewing people for government positions. One of the people he interviewed was a man named Charles Ghetto. And he was a kind of a loser, really. He had tried a lot of different things.

He tried to be a lawyer for a while. He tried to be an evangelical preacher. He started a free love commune for a while. But even that didn't work. They actually kicked him out of his own commune. Ah. They tried to make Charles Get Out, which isn't like the most clever play, but anyway. So he showed up at the White House and he demanded a job as Minister to France. And they said no, because you don't have any experience doing anything.

So at this point, he decides that he's receiving messages from God that he needs to kill the president, because he didn't make a minister to France. So that's what he decides to do. He shines his shoes and he gets a gun and he goes to a train station where he knows Garfield's gonna be and he shot him. Now the thing about it is that the where the bullet went in,

actually probably, if you got to get shot, wasn't that bad of a place, the wound itself was not fatal. What happened after this is that, because the bullet went in about 3.5 inches, and it lodged kind of below his pancreas, but just in the middle, kind of a lot of nothing, a lot of not important stuff, I mean, everything's kind of important,

but like not the most important stuff that you need, it's okay, the bullet's okay. But all the physicians around him were like, we're going to save the president. So they all rush the scene and there are all these doctors who show up and they're all digging in this wound with their dirty fingers trying to get this bullet back out to save the poor guy's life. Lincoln wants to help, and so he calls in, Dr. D. Willard Bliss. Now Justin, I have a note right here that I need you to read,

out loud, Dr. D. Willard Bliss. Ask me what the D stands for Justin. Okay, what is the D stands for? It stands for doctor. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

That's good. I'll give you that one, Spural. That's good. He's called named him doctor. I mean, called Shah right there, right? And he would, and like, as you would imagine, if you're named, like he was arrogant and he was reckless and he was a man who knew Like, what you can't fire me?

No, I'm doctor. I'll still be doctor. I'm still doctor. He had no regard for antiseptic technique, not many people did at the time. And he refused to believe also that he kind of looked at him and said, I know where this bullet is. And it is definitely on the right side of your body and not the left. So we're going to keep probing towards the right side of your body and try to find this bullet.

So he kept searching for the bullet. In the meantime, he was giving him like quinoine, a lot of morphine, lots of brand-ine. How was it at the pain? Some mercury. He actually at one point called in Alexander Graham Bell who had invented this thing. Like, can you call a better doctor, please?

I can. I can. It was called an induction balanced device and it was basically a metal detector. And he called them in to use this new brand new what we would think of now as a metal detector to just search the right side of his body for the bull. He wouldn't even let him look on the left.

He was so certain that it was on the right. Well, obviously, he didn't find the bullet and they kept digging and all and all about a dozen or so doctors at some point had their finger inside this poor man. You can imagine, over time, the wound was like 20 inches long. It was quite infected. It was pouring pus. He got very sick. And 80 days later, he died, unfortunately. Now, what's that?

How long? 80 days. That's a cool 80 days, huh? That's a cool, that's a cool nearly three months to have for your last of them. Mmm, good. That's definitely how I want to spend them. Me too. I get fiddiest fog, I was like, hey, you want to come chill in a balloon?

And they was like, no, what I'm going to do is I'm on a line of tables. I let doctors just like get up in there. It's like, I'm dead, okay? At least, I mean, they did give him a lot of brandy. Oh, that's cool. After he died, his murderer, Charles Gato, went on trial, of course for it. They knew he was only shot him. And he actually, he pled guilty to shooting him.

He admitted he did. But he pled not guilty to murdering him. And what he said was, listen, I just shot him. His doctors killed him. Fair, right? Fair to fence? Which, while true, did not hold up. He was found guilty. I was just trying to spook the guy. I don't know what I'm trying to put his scaring to him. Wow, so you guys, you guys don't come what I'm just book of the guy. I don't know what I'm... Trying to put his scare into him. Um, wow, so you guys, you guys don't come out great in this one, huh? No.

You guys don't come out too great. No, we, we rarely do at this point in history. Yeah, it's not a hot time for you all. No, I mean, that's what every one of these is. You read them, it's like, what did we do? We gave them, you know, like, some opium and some mercury and some coinine, and then he died. I don't know We'll do it again next time and see what happens

Hey, everybody this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for having us. This is great We're gonna take a 15-minute intermission and then we'll be right back with my brother my brother me But until then But until then, my name is Justin McElroy. Justin McElroy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head! Alright!